You do realize, I hope, that this all sounds wildly speculative to anyone who works in biomedical research? 

 

Well, not Aubrey de Grey. :) But seriously, let's say that one asked biomedical researchers, "Imagine a scenario where you had billions of researchers much more capable than the best scientists who ever lived thinking for centuries of subjective time and running trillions of in vitro experiments and billions of in vivo experiments on small animals and could create nano bots (e.g. white blood cells) and could experiment on thousands of recently deceased people, do you think they could solve aging?" I would be interested in the percentage of them who would describe this as wildly speculative.

It builds assumption on top of assumption. 

Basically you're saying 'trust us, ASI can do ANYTHING it needs to do to gather ALL the data it needs, by any means necessary, to solve all diseases quickly, reliably, with no side-effects, no tradeoffs, and no catastrophic tragedies that would turn public opinion against the whole enterprise'. 

That is not a compelling argument to me at all, and I think its implausibility undercuts the common talking point among e/accs and pro-AI lobbyists that 'ASI would cure death quickly and easily'

To be clear, I disagree with high confidence that ASI would cure death quickly and easily, especially if that means death is actually cured, rather than we have a cure available. Indeed, catastrophic tragedies could turn public opinion against the whole enterprise. And I'm not claiming there would be no trade-offs, especially because many people say now they don't want to live forever. I'm also not claiming no side effects, but that the alternative of dying would be worse. I think we should pause at AGI because ASI would be dangerous. But if ASI were aligned, I do think it is plausible that it could quickly develop a cure for aging.

I'm extremely skeptical that it would be possible to 'simulate biology from first principles' in any computationally feasible way, given the hierarchical complexity of biology across huge range of scales -- both spatial (from biomolecules to organelles to cells, tissues, organs, and organism) and temporal (from femtoseconds to decades). We just don't have any 'first principles' in biology that are analogous to physical laws that could be used to simulate planet formation or weather. 

It could simulate individual atoms, and work up from there. Yes, that is prohibitively computationally expensive now, but the ASI could scale up computation many OOMs and could probably model it much more efficiently than we could. It probably wouldn't need to model all the atoms because of sub modeling the different scales you note (like we do with weather). I'm not confident that it could do this in a few years, but I think it's generally a risky bet to say that ASI can't figure out something quickly.

We also don't have the data required to 'run trillions of lab-on-a-chip experiments'.

I was saying it could gather data with those experiments, e.g. testing out many different nanobots/drugs on many different types of tissue. Why would it need to have data in order to run the experiments?

And I cannot imagine any situations in which 'nano bots that could remove cancer cells' could be deployed in living humans without the first several thousands patients dying in surprising and gruesome ways. 

It could experiment on living cancer tissue in vitro. It looks like transgenic Zebrafish get cancer in 2-4 weeks. And as I commented below, it could wait until after death to try to fix - more than 20k people donate their body to science a year.

There was this paper (not by ALLFED) saying fish catch would generally be lower in nuclear winter. However, the model does not take into account the fact that as medium and large fish are removed, there would be more small fish that people could catch (what I call, "fishing lower on the food chain"). We want to model this and the feasibility of converting fishing boats to catch the smaller fish.

An option to circumvent current laws would be the person dying, and then being fixed by the tech and revived. This could be thought of as like "fast cryonics."

Let's break this into two questions:
1. After a few years of ASI, will the ASI be able to stop or reverse aging?
2. After a few years of ASI, will hardly anyone die of aging related diseases?
Let's tackle number one first. It's true the ASI would not be able to do long term human trials the regular way. However, I think it could learn a lot from the data from running trillions of lab-on-a-chip experiments. I think it could develop nano bots that could remove cancer cells and repair aging related damage. And it could get quick feedback by making C. elegans, etc immortal. It might also be able to simulate biology from first principles in order to run the equivalent of decades long human trials.  

I also think it could develop noninvasive (or at least non-destructive) scanning techniques that would allow someone's consciousness to be simulated. And even if that doesn't count, it might even be able to build up a new biological human that has equivalent consciousness to the original (which still may not count depending on one's values). There are likely many other routes to quick longevity that I can't think of but an ASI could.

As for the second question, would people allow the, e.g., repair nano bots into their bodies? One subquestion is whether countries would allow it. Based on current laws, probably not, though it's possible they would change quickly due to ASI (and people could go into international waters). Another subquestion is if it is legal, would people do it? Obviously some people would not, but if the alternative is a soon death, I think many people would.

Some people are concerned about AI x-risk, and they have P(doom)s in the 5–25% range. I don't get that. I can't pass an Ideological Turing Test for someone who sees all these problems, but still expects us to avert extinction with >75% probability. I don't understand what would lead one to believe that this is what things look like when we're on track to solving a problem.

P(doom) does not necessarily equal extinction. Paul Christiano had (in 2023) P(AI takeover) at 22%, and P(most humans die from takeover) = 11% (but then other ways of most people dying). But he has much lower probabilities of extinction due to pseudo pico kindness, acausal trade, etc.

Outside of EA, when people get rich I doubt there are a bunch of charity lobbyists breathing down their necks?

Yes, there are. This is the high net worth individual strategy that so many charities use (one of my universities even had a mini course on how to do it).

Do we need a scared reaction option on the EA Forum?

Microalgae is fairly expensive, so I think macroalgae is more promising - most of it is low protein, but there are high protein varieties. Leaf protein concentrate (e.g. Leaft) seems promising as well.

Plant-based meat prices per pound are based on frozen and refrigerated plant-based meat subcategories from SPINS year ending 12/1/24. Animal-based meat prices per pound are based on data for fresh meat subcategories from the Circana year ending Dec. 2024.

Fresh meat typically costs more, and it seems like this includes whole muscle meat, so I think if you do a fair comparison, PBM is more like double the cost of ground beef.

Nice! Did you consider seaweed or leaf protein concentrate? The numbers I've seen is that PBM is still twice the price of ground beef - did that source compare to all beef?